Fabulous data analysis of the Kony 2012 phenomenon. Social Flow makes the valuable point that the video went viral in part because of the tremendously active social network Invisible Children had already established, not simply because it went viral among otherwise minimally connected people. The post also goes into an analysis of the Twitter profiles of that already established network–smart stuff.

Using the NSCA’s informative brochure, I tried to create an engaging, clear and concise history of the Sudanese conflict. Take a look! I struggled with tense because “Sudan”–as a country containing the southern region–doesn’t exist anymore. There’s Sudan and the Republic of Southern Sudan now. Additionally, I should find more statistics on the refugee/immigration rates. Hope everyone’s implementation is going well!.

I copied and pasted the personal histories posted so far into a single document (over 10,000 words!) and the uploaded that document to Many Eyes, a data visualization website. Using text as data, it can be analyzed as word clouds, word trees, phrase nets, and a few other configurations. I saved a phrase net, although accidentally did so as “anonymous”.

Feel free to play around with the data set, create your own visualization, share it on the Many Eyes site but also share it here or your personal blog. Data visualization is a an important sub-field of social media; tools like Many Eyes can both help us analyze trends, see patterns, and make additional contributions to social media.